Recap: Elio is my grandfather, my Nonno. For someone who is known around his hometown as the man with a perpetual smile on his face, I can only hope to be as content as he is one day. These are simply the stories that he has recounted to me with a twinkle in his eye and that I hope to keep alive by writing them down.

But love and marriage and wine labels? Perhaps not so in most cases, but I shall highlight how one day, not so many moons ago, these three became inextricably linked.

I have never considered myself an artist by any means. I did grow up though with a creatively charged mother fostering my finger painting/plaster fun house/pottery talents, as well as falling for that appendage on Mr Squiggle and making sure the ABC’s other godsend Art Attack was a permanent fixture in my weekly television intake. The teenage years saw my high school offer us students every art medium possible. I gave life drawing a go. I read and began grasping the technique of Naoko Takeuchi’s manga, before dappling with waterpaints as shown by my mother for how best to capture a memory when travelling overseas. Despite the various creative outlets I was given the opportunity to trial, there was one style that stayed strong and true wherever I would go. Close friends and family, in particular colleagues from past places of work, have at one stage or another been the victim of random cartoon sketches by yours truly during my employment. The most memorable was during my five month stint at Henschke winery in the Eden Valley. At the end of the working day I would occasionally loiter in the winemaker’s office/laboratory, whiteboard marker in hand, waiting for my unsuspecting victims to leave, before then leaping onto their desk and beginning an elaborate caricature of one of the employees. I think I chose my first suspect well. It just so happened to be the unassuming Stephen Henschke who walked into the office bright and early the next day to analyse the work board, only to be confronted by a strange cartoon likeness of himself on the adjacent side. Suffice to say that I think he was impressed, considering that I got asked to continue working post-vintage to assist in the cellar long after that sketch had first appeared.

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